Data Brokers Don't Know You From A Naked Man Stumbling On The Beach

Matthew Monahan is the twentysomething CEO of an Internet startup. And a different Matthew Monahan is the twentysomething CEO of another Internet startup. At one time they even lived in the same town. And therein lies the problem of accuracy at data brokers keeping dossiers on all of us.

Data brokers gather personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans. Where you live. Your relatives and friends. What you say on social media. What you buy. What political party you are registered with. However, many of the dossiers they sell about you contain errors. Sometime they list correct phone numbers or associations, other times they show data that has nothing to do with you. Credit reports also contain mistakes.

One Matthew Monahan heads Inflection, a company that owns PeopleSmart.com, a leading people lookup site. Such sites buy information from companies which aggregate public records such as voter and house registration details from across the country. Other data brokers such as
Acxiom add on commercial information to help companies with direct marketing efforts.

Monahan of Inflection says that linking data records correctly from so many different sources remains a difficult task because many people share the same name. He points to the example of his namesake Matthew Monahan, CEO of AlphaBoost, which works to assist social advertisers.

That confusion caused embarrassment earlier this year when somebody posted a video of the AlphaBoost CEO naked on a beach in India and stumbling around while drunk. A
Google search for Matthew Monahan CEO will turn up links to both men as well as the video. Those not familiar with the two men could confuse who is who. The two men have communicated and sometimes received each other's mail and email.

"Recently we both went to the same conference and when I was checking in, the event organizers had our shuttles mixed up, and they had a good chuckle asking me if I was also involved in making inappropriate videos," the Inflection CEO said.

Amid such confusion, a data broker could easily mix up information on the two executives. Even with so many suppliers sucking up details of our personal transactions at every step and selling them to data brokers, errors plague the process.

In 2012, one woman who had suffered years of occasional beatings left her husband after he choked her. She moved to another state and obtained a court order against him. (I am withholding the woman’s name and the data broker service for the woman’s safety). She feared he would stalk her after she moved out. Since they still had a joint bank account, she could see the charges he was making, and noticed he was looking her up on Spokeo and PeopleFinder.com. She assumed he was looking for evidence of a lover (which she says had not happened since she moved out). She felt the easy availability of such personal information was akin to advertising: “Hey, psycho husbands, why don't you come stalk your wives?”

To see how much someone could learn about her, she asked me to look up her file from a data broker. We went over her report line by line to assess its accuracy The report had her correct birthday, but listed her birth year off by 12 months. It correctly listed her addresses from when she grew up until the house where she left her husband. Her current address, which she had tried to keep out of public records, was not listed, nor were her current phone numbers. Her report showed several other people associated with her Social Security number – she did not know any of them.

The service listed an arrest record which was not hers, but missed some of her past traffic infractions. The file correctly noted a past bankruptcy filing.

The personal dossier said she had owned a 1980 Honda Accord, a car she never possessed. It listed her as having registered as a Democrat. She said in the past she had registered as a Republican and an Independent, but never as Democrat. Her list of relatives correctly identified her parents and other relatives, but included some names she did not recognize. She did not know anyone on her list of likely and possible associates.

Overall, the dossier proved quite uneven, sometimes totally correct, slightly off in a few cases, and completely wrong in others. By accident, data brokers are making it easier for her to avoid being found because of the many false clues in her file. Given her plight, that is a good thing, but best would be an option to opt out easily from many data brokers at the same time.

Earlier this summer, Julie Brill, a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, gave an interesting speech in which she called for a new policy giving consumers control over their information gathered by data brokers. She called her proposal “Reclaim Your Name.”

“Reclaim Your Name would empower the consumer to find out how brokers are collecting and using data; give her access to information that data brokers have amassed about her; allow her to opt-out if she learns a data broker is selling her information for marketing purposes; and provide her the opportunity to correct errors in information used for substantive decisions – like credit, insurance, employment, and other benefits,” Brill said.

Transparency and choice are generally good things in commerce and should be the standard with personal data. And until the day such a policy comes into force, the errors in data broker files may be a boon for people who prefer to keep a low profile, or for whose very safety depends on it.